The final step in modernizing the Fogg is making more of the building handicapped-accessible. Many of the museum’s largest and most attractive lecture rooms and exhibition halls are currently inaccessible by wheelchair. Because the Fogg was built long before the American Disabilities Act of 1990, rooms like the Norton Lecture Hall, which seats four hundred, are not handicapped-accessible and frequently underused. The building remains exempt from ADA standards, since plans currently exist to renovate it.

“We don’t want to exclude people,” says Benefield.

LEARNING TO FLASH THE ID

If there is one thing that Benefield wishes to communicate to students, it is to “learn how to flash the ID.” Those little cards, Benefield says, provide “access to this enormous resource which is here for them.” It’s one of the ways that the museums are more accessible to students than many of Boston’s other galleries.

But few, if any, posters advertising exhibitions and events at the museums appear on the bulletin boards and table tents across campus, which frequently announce the latest a cappella jam or Loeb production. Museum administrators can wish all day for student turnout and still not see the kind of numbers that the better advertised arts events on campus enjoy.

HUAM’s assistant director Luann Abrahams emphasizes that the museums are a unique experience compared to the other entertainment options on campus.

“Museums are often positioned as being in competition with other leisure time activities, such as movies, video games, etc.,” says Abrahams. “What we try to do here is not to entertain, but to instead create an environment where people can have meaningful encounters with works of art.”

She says she would like to see students move outside the mindset of museums as simply a nothing-else-going-on-this-weekend visit. “We’re always working on ways to make HUAM more central to the life of the entire University,” says Abrahams, “so that people come here to engage with works of art regardless of their academic background in the subject.”

Abrahams and Benefield face something of an uphill battle. Attendance at the museums has remained somewhat steady over the past five years. Though the annual attendance has increased by roughly three thousand visitors since 1999, the proportion of those visitors who are students has declined. In 1999, the percentage of total visitors who identified themselves as Harvard students was roughly 18 percent, while students made up only 15 percent of last year’s visitors.

Students may be less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a museum visit when faced with the multitude of extracurricular options at the University, even if many of the same students oohed and aahed at the exhibits during pre-frosh visits.

“Instead of a lack of interest, I sense a lack of awareness among the student body,” says Alexis M. Kusy ’07, a member of the Student Friends, an extension of HUAM’s existing membership program that specifically targets undergraduates and offers invitations to exclusive exhibit openings and reduced admission to lectures and concerts.

Although the Student Friends have a group on thefacebook.com with over 300 members, its leaders say that the majority of the Harvard undergraduate population is not familiar with the extent of the museums’ offerings.

“The typical response I hear is, ‘I don’t know much about art museums, but I want to learn,’” says Christopher W. Platts ’06, the group’s president of the Student Friends.

Platts also presents another possible cause for the museums’ empty halls. “It is difficult to get students [to visit] because museums are always there,” he says.

Platts also notes that there may less of a personal social incentive to visit the museums as an undergraduate.